Dexter Palmer: Version Control

Dear Author,

For many pages you don't let us know whether or not Version Control is science fiction: We're a few decades in the future where cars drive themselves and computers generate ever more realistic speech and images. But is time travel possible? Or is Philip wasting his time on a dead-end research path? Both sound possible in this character-driven novel.

You take your time to show us Rebecca and Philip: How they live now, how they got to know each other and fell in love. How the death of their son Sean pried them apart. And while we come to understand Rebecca's grief and regret, we watch Philip bury himself in his research until he loves his work, his causality violation device more than his wife.

I'm finding it difficult to review Version Control without spoiling it for other readers. So let me just say that I enjoyed most chapters. Some sidelines, like the president and the dating website, got too much space. It's captivating at first when Philip explains how a dating service, in order to make the most profit, must be bad but just good enough so people will stay. I don't see why you gave it quite so many pages later. I loved how exasperated Alicia and Carson get when somebody asks them about being a woman in science or a black man respectively. "Can we just agree that I talk about gravitation without having to point out the existence of my vagina before I begin?" That's a future I hope we will reach soon: a future where one's sex and skin colour become boring topics.

Yours sincerely
Christina Widmann de Fran

Version Control: A Novel by Dexter Palmer

first published in 2016 by Pantheon

ISBN: 9780307907592)

Get your copy on Amazon.co.uk.